Oxidized copper and stones

Just finished a new piece.  I've been moving toward adding more color to my oxidized copper tube pieces, mostly with gemstones.  This is the latest.  I have a tendency to design for myself--i.e.something I would wear (or sometimes something I would wear if I lived a life that included dressing up, which I mostly don't).  That keeps the work relatively conservative.  This one is a bit bigger than I would tend to wear myself, but I like it a lot.  I think the mix of stone shapes based on molecular structures  and copper tube structures based more on engineering forms works well.  Particularly since it corresponds with the mix of color and no-color.
  I think my next step will be to combine the 2 kinds of beads more closely--like a polyhedron where some of the beads are round gemstones and some are copper tubes.  This is tricky because generally the long beads need structures made mostly of triangles, or else they're too floppy, and I tend to avoid triangles with the round beads.  That's partly because too much thread shows in a triangle made from 3 beads, and also because I like the more open look you get with bigger circles of beads.

Rounded corner cubes

   A few posts back, I talked about some necklaces I'd done with interlocked cubes.  I like them alot, but they're pretty slow to do.  One of the things I liked was the transition from the RAW cube modules that make up the big cubes at the bottom (I'm saying "big cube" to distinguish the overall element from the modules that make it up) to the triangular prism modules that make up the "chain" part of the necklace.  By triangular prism I mean that that the sides of each module in that part of the necklace are 8-bead cubes, but there are only 3 sides, so the cross section is a 6-bead equilateral triangle.  It makes that part of the necklace a bit smaller, and quicker to make.  I started wondering if there was a way to make the big cubes using  triangular prisms for the modules.  Turns out you can.  The corner of each big cube is a tetrahedron.  Of course the modules coming off the tetrahedrons don't "want" to make a right angle corner.  They're really at 120 degrees.  But in the same way that you can make a rounded tetrahedron using RAW cube modules, you can make a rounded cube using tatrahedrons at the corners.
  I usually find that an advantage of forcing  beads to do something they don't "want" to do in that way is that it stiffens the piece up.  That didn't really happen here.  I suppose that just the fact that each big cube made this was has a lot fewer beads in it than it would have if made with cube modules, thay came out floppier than I expected (or wanted).  I ended up having to go back and add beads in contrasting colors between the modules on each face to stiffen it up.  I like that, but it at least partly removed the speed advantage I was hoping for.  I'd like to make a whole necklace of interlocked cubes, and, once again, it'll be pretty slow going.
   One more thing.  I don't know if you can see it very well from the picture but when I added the green cube on the left to the gold cube next to it, I goofed, and didn't link it onto the opposite corner on the gold bead, but instead to the opposite corner of the same face of the cube.  Should have been the opposite corner of the opposite face.  However, in the grand artist tradition of deciding that a mistake is really a "design element", I did it again on the other side.  Works for me.
 

Oxidized copper earrings

Just a quick post.  I've been getting ready for a show in Atlanta (the Atlanta Dogwood Festival in Piedmont Park, if you're in the area).  The oxidized copper tube beads I've been working with lend themselves well to making structures for earrings, so I've just finished several new earring designs.They're all just combinations of tetrahedrons and octahedrons, but by using different length tubes you get interesting structures.  The ear wires are oxidized sterling silver.  I like to do the kind of post that needs an earring back to hold it on.  That's because the earrings are so open that I don't want an extra wire hanging down behind the ear, the way you'd have with something like a French wire.  So far they all have mirror image pieces for the other ear, but I'd like to do some where the 2 earrings are close, but not identical.

more metal beads

    Just finished this one.  I went back to my oxidized copper beads, but I now have round ones as well as tube beads.  The round ones are a pain to use, though.  These are 3.5 mm.  The holes are quite small and hard to find.  But, more than this, since the beads are hollow, your needle goes in one side of the bead, and then has to feel its way around the wall on the other side till it finds the hole to get out.  Actually the same is true of the nickel silver beads (the bright ones in this piece), but their holes are much bigger in relation to the size of the beads.
    Despite the griping, I like the way this one came out.  I like the asymmetry, as well as the way the tube beads in the chain open the piece up.  And they do speed up the weaving, so I probably shouldn't complain about the time it took to make the major shapes out of the round beads.

Shapes

        I've been taking some time to try to expand my vocabulary of the shapes I can make using round gemstone beads.  These are 4 mm, mostly red aventurine, for no particular reason except that I had a lot of it.  I was interested in the idea of graduated sizes, so I came up with 4 sizes of disks, 3 of sort of teardrop shapes and a couple of  kind of lozenge-ish shapes.  The curvy pieces at the top left had to do with trying to make shapes that were not just convex (I think that's right, I sometimes get concave and convex mixed up, but anyway shapes that curved inward as well as outward).  I made a necklace using the graduated rounds.  Unfortunately, I hadn't figured out the 4th, largest, disk yet, so it just has 3 sizes.  That 4th size, by the way, is pretty big-- 2 1/2" in diameter (6.2ish cm).
     

Scaffold with gemstone shapes

  I've been wanting to combine gemstone beads with my oxidized copper scaffold structures.  The first one I did ( I don't have a picture of it) was quite a regular, repeating structure.  Also, it used just one kind of gemstone, and it was gray feldspar, so it didn't add a lot of color.  Anyway, nice, but I wanted something with more unpredictability to it.  This is what I came up with.  It uses red agate, red aventurine, green marble, blue quartz, yellow quartz and gray feldspar.  Also, no 2 scaffold structures are alike.  I think it's much more interesting.  I've never "strung" beads on a cord, so it is more complicated to incorporate the colored shapes with the oxidized copper, but I got it to work.

The trickiest shapes to use were the cubes.  Each gemstone shape has a tube bead running through it.  When I made my first cube (they're 2x2x2 cubes) I discovered the only way I could put a tube through it was like this:
The tube had to go through the middle of one of the rows of cubes, so it's offset on the total cube.  If the cube were 3x3x3 cubes there'd be a path down the middle, but that would be way too big.  But then it occurred to me that this cube, which is made of 54 beads, has just 2 running down each center axis.  So you could just leave out 2 beads, and you'd have one center axis that was free.    So I took it apart and left out 2 center beads, and got the one in the 2nd picture.  I couldn't figure  out a very effiicient path to build it without those 2 center beads, but anyway, I got it done.

Simplicity

   I just finished this piece, and I'm pleased with it.  It's so easy to get hung up on complexity, and I've been guilty of that too.  This piece relies on the color interaction betwen the black and white silkstone beads and the red agate.  Other than that it's simple--just buckyballs and a tube structure.  The only complexity was in making the tube curve at the top and bottom (it has too much stiffness to be able to take that sharp a curve by itself), and that doesn't have the appearance of complexity anyway.
   I  work with color a lot in my rugs, and I've always felt that that is one of the things I do reasonably well.  In the rugs, I dye my own colors, and that makes a huge difference.  When I first started beading, I was really frustrated because I couldn't just throw beads in a pot and make them any color I wanted.  So I sort of de-emphasized color, and did a lot of work in a fairly limited palette.   Then, more recently, I've started doing some seed bead pieces with more color, and have liked them.  But with the gemstone pieces, I've still been working in a fairly limited color range, partly because at the moment I'm still pretty cheap and don't buy the more expensive gemstone beads.  Also, I try to stay away from dyed gemstone beads.  I must confess that I have wondered about these red agate beads.  But Shipwreck Beads usually says when beads are dyed, and they don't list these as dyed, so I've been using them a lot.  They punch up a piece nicely.  I wish I could find a good blue too. I'm too cheap, at the moment, to buy lapis lazuli.  I bought blue sodalite once and made a piece that looked pretty nice, but I had so much trouble with the beads breaking that I ended up taking it apart, and I've never bought sodalite since.  Have any of you used sodalite, and what was your experience with it?  I'd love to think I just got a bad batch, but wherever those pretty white inclusions appeared, the bead broke there.  It was as if the white was just chalk.  Any ideas?

3 cube pendant

Since I wrote last time about the steps it took me to get to this design, I figured I ought to post the final product.  Quite simple, but I'm pleased with it.

reinventing the wheel, design-wise

    When I was doing the sampler I talked about last time, the hardest thing to figure out was an outside right angle in 2 directions like you have on the corner of a cube.  I tried several ways before I got one I liked.  My plan was to make 3 interlocked cubes, where each outside corner
 would turn into a long tube that would go behind the neck to form a pendant.  I wanted it to be pretty big and chunky, for maximum impact.  But by the time I had made 2 cubes using 4 mm stone beads, I realized it was just too big for jewelry (it would have stuck out over 2 1/2" from the body).  You can see in the picture there's still line (fireline) hanging off one of the cubes.  That's because It was pretty complicated and I did lots of backtracking to fix mistakes.  As I finished it up I found 1 last mistake, and haven't yet worked up the ambition to tear out the last corner to fix it.  It's one that only I would notice--but I would notice it. 

    Anyway, I decided to start again, using #8 seed beads in metallic colors.  I've been doing so much work with gemstone beads lately that I had forgotten how much quicker it is to work with seed beads. Hurray for big holes.  So it went quicker and, while still big, it was a better size.  But I found I couldn't get the stiffness I needed using fireline.  It needed to be monofilament.  But as I thought about starting over once again, I thought, wait a minute, I've been making open cubes like this for years--using RAW.  And while I like the sort of organic look of the rounded corners and all, RAW would be SO MUCH EASIER.  One of the things that had gotten me started on the whole project was that when I was trying to make these corners, back in my sampler, I had made one that, while I didn't like it as a plain corner, would be a great structure for morphing into  the long tube structure I wanted for the the pendant.  But I came up with a way to make an "organic" looking connection in RAW from the cube to the chain, and now I'm on my way.  But what a long way around!

 

Sampler

This is a piece I'm really proud of--even though it's not pretty, or something I can sell.  For a while now, I've been working on these tube pieces, and gradually finding what works and what doesn't.  The trouble is, I often try various ways to, for example, make a smooth curve, till I get what I want.  But some of the ones I didn't want might be a structure that's useful for something else--except that I've torn it out and after a while I can't remember how I did it.  So this is a sort of sampler.  In it I have several ways to make a 60, 120, and (most importantly) 90 degree turn.  The hardest was to make a corner, like you'd have if you were making an open cube.  The inside curve was easy, the the outside curve would either have a big knob on it, or be too flat and pull the inside out of its 90 degree-ness.  Anyway, I learned an enormous amount, and have generated lots of ideas for future pieces.

Red Gemstone Necklace

Since I've been doing these tube necklaces in nickel silver beads, I've wanted to use the same techniques in a piece made from gemstone beads.  This is the first one.  It's made from brecciated jasper beads (the dark ones) and red agate beads as accents.  I like the way the colors bring out the geometry of the piece.  Stone beads are a little slower to work with, because the holes are so small, but I like them, and will probably do more.  I used fireline for thread.  I mostly have been using monofilament nylon, for the extra body, but it's too bulky in these small holes, and I've found that if I make an extra pass all around the circumference as I end each round of hexagons, I get sufficient body.  By the way, I've experimented with different sizes of tubes, measured by the number of hexagons that make a "row", and for the most part I find a 4 hexagon circumference works well.  That's what I've used here.

Cubic super RAW

     I did 2 different structures trying to "cubify" Gwen Fisher's super RAW.  I didn't have access to the her blog as I was doing them, which is good, because It turned out that neither is the structure she used.  I wanted to keep the octagon in alternating colors that her flat version has.  What I ended up with is according to my handy wikipedia list of Archimedean solids, a truncated cube (i.e.a cube with the corners cut off to form triangles at the corners)  I did a single version and a double.  One thing I remembered about Gwen's version, though, is that it had hexagons at the corners, and this one has triangles.  So I tried again.  That's picture #3, and in the Archimedean solids it's a truncated cuboctahedron.  The funny thing is that it's actually the same bead I did several posts ago, and I called it Gwen's bead, because O it's relationship with something that I can't now remember.  I'll have to go back to those posts and look, but meanwhile I seem to have arrived at the same bead, approaching from 2 different directions.
    It was the different arrangements of the colors that made me not initially recognise the structure I saw.  Similarly it was the different color arrangements that made me not recognise the structure that Gwen had actually made for her CSRAW  (maybe we should call it super cubic right angle weave, because SCRAW is alot more pronounceable than CSRAW).  Anyway her structure is a truncated octahedron, which is one of my favorite shapes because you can incorporate a round(ish) structure with RAW.  I usually do it in a single color, and so I didn't recognise it.
   It occurs to me that one reason I usually do structures in a single color dates back to my learning to weave them.  I learned both the Plato bead (dodecahedron) and Archimedes bead (truncated icosahedron) from Valerie Hector's book.  I had, of course, no idea at the time how the names Plato and Archimedes were related to the shapes.  Anyway, the Archimedes bead took me a while and I had to do it in 2 colors in order to keep track of what I was doing.  I felt like it was a personal milestone when I got to where I could keep track of it without the "crutch" of 2 colors.  Now I'm starting to realize that the color arrangements can enhance the pieces.  Hmm...some rethinking may be in order.

One of my favorite uses of the truncated octahedron (clearly we need a shorter name) is, in fact, analogous to what Gwen's molecule did in her last post.  It's a series of necklaces that I call my Garland series.  This is my favorite of them.  It's the interesting angles as which the RAW sections come off the spheres that makes them interesting.